Research project cites need to assemble future war force of replaceable components

Manfred von Richthofen was the World War I German flying ace famous for his 80 aerial victories in dogfights in the skies over Europe between September 1916 and his death in April 1918.

Advertisement - story continues below

But the American military now is assembling a program that is intended to teach artificial intelligence to do what he did through flying skill and natural instinct, reports Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency says it has created the Air Combat Evolution program to "increase warfighter trust in autonomous combat technology."

After all, AI already has been programmed to defeat chess grandmasters, professional poker players, and world-class human experts in the online strategy games Dota 2 and StarCraft II.

The research agency notes, however, "No AI currently exists, however, that can outduel a human strapped into a fighter jet in a high-speed, high-G dogfight."

Advertisement - story continues below

The goal, then, is an "automated air-to-air combat, enabling reaction times at machine speeds and freeing pilots to concentrate on the larger air battle."

Actually, the AI program is less about dogfighting, which likely isn't going to happen much in the future, and "more about giving pilots the confidence that AI and automation can handle a high-end fight."